Welcome to the latest episode of the Salon Marketing Q&A. My name is Chris Brennan, and today, we’re going to be answering a question that you guys have asked live on Facebook.

If you’ve tuned into a previous episode before, you know the deal. You guys can ask me a question and ill answer it on an episode of the Salon Marketing Q&A. You can drop that question into the comments box and if you can’t watch this live, we’re going to be posting this onto our Facebook page as well putting it onto our YouTube page, so there’s plenty of opportunities for you to catch the entire show at a later date if that’s more convenient for you.

Today’s topic is creating urgency in your salon marketing messaging. This question comes from Neil from Jacksonville. He says, “The issue or issues that we’re having is being able to market ourselves to our chosen demographic at the right time. How do we deem what an optimum timed delivery for our messages via like, say social media and email and also how do we craft a message to create a sense of urgency?”

Great question, Neil. Thank you so much. What we’re talking about here is a couple of different things. I’m going to start off with the optimum time first and then I’ll get into the scarcity question.

For your optimum time, what you want to do is send out a message at the best time that your audience will actually engage with your materials, your content. Whether that be email or social. One great way to actually see this is by going to your Facebook page, your salon Facebook business page and in there, you can actually see in your Facebook insights, there’s a section dedicated to the best times that your audience actually engage with the content that you put out. That’s a perfect place to see what the best times are for your audience.

This would be mainly for Facebook, primarily for social media. But this insight is actually quite good for email as well because what we’re seeing is this is when they’re gonna be available on their computer or on their phone, so they’re actually going to be more susceptible to the suggestions that you’re putting forward for them in your marketing material. I would say that I’d hedge a bet to say that if you check out your own insights page, you might see that the best time to engage is actually the evening.

A lot of times, even for us, like, our page, a lot of the material we put out, say we boost a post and we schedule that post to actually go out around 8 PM or 9 PM because you can actually see a very clear build from about like 4 PM on and it just kind of slopes up and it peaks around 8 PM or 9 PM.

That’s how we kind of justify what the time is that we put out a lot of our material. It makes sense, too, because when I first started I had this idea in my head of the optimum time for a salon owner to actually engage with our material. I had no evidence I was just kind of winging it, let’s say.

So I thought a really good time would be in the morning before they start work because work is on their mind, etc. But when I checked out the insights, it actually turned out to be more like 8 PM or 9 PM. That makes a lot of sense too, because then I started building out a scenario or building out a character of who I would be marketing to, I could imagine that a lot of the people that we’re talking to were probably working all day and they’ve got a lot of things on their mind. A big to do list that they can’t actually get through that day.

They finally finish work. Pick up the kids. Drop them off. Make dinner. Put the kids to bed and finally around 9 PM or so, they’re just settling in on the couch. Phone is out. TV is on. They’re kind of ignoring TV. And now, they’re actually scrolling through Facebook. And that’s when they’re most engaged with our content.

It’s amazing how I actually, when I was winging it, I had it wrong the first time. When I looked at the analytics, I found that oh, well, look, this is actually the right time for us. So I’d recommend you check that out yourself and see what the time is. You can actually use this time to schedule your emails as well.

If you’re SMS, I wouldn’t put it at that time, though. That’s quite late for an SMS. SMS is fantastic because you’re guaranteed that people will see it, but it feels a bit more personable to actually send an SMS and you want to keep that as the daytime. I would recommend checking out Facebook and then for your social media, try to schedule your organic posts, one a day, at least one a day and try to have one of them go out around 8 PM. One of your best pieces of content.

Not too sales-y, but just kind of reminding people that you exist. That would be really what I’d say about optimal time.

In terms of creating urgency, there’s a couple of things you can do here and I would say that one of these ways to create urgency is to kind of prioritize the scarcity of an offer. So, for example, if you are putting out a campaign and you want to highlight that you have a new product on the line or you have a really great offer, what we want to do is we want to highlight that there’s not too many of them actually left. It’s a limited supply or it’s a limited spaces, so you want to create the illusion the person might miss out on this offer.

It’s now or never. My previous job, I worked in this company called Euro Cycles Euro Baby and I started using the Facebook page really well. I’d go down to the actual shop and I’d ask them what are we low on stock or what is this one thing we’re looking to sell? They would highlight these actual, like a stroller or a car seat, so I’d take a photo of that and I’d go on Facebook and I’d go, “Guys, this is last one we have here. PM me if you want to claim it yourself.” And funny enough, that started getting a lot of reaction.

Because I was just like, “Wow, I can put out a post going, ‘Here’s the online link. You can check out all of these car seats and stuff,'” but instead, I focused on just one and I made sure that they understood that this is the last one, PM me. So all of a sudden, people started thinking, “Should I get in there fast? I want to get in there for this one special offer for this one specific product.”

That’s one way to do it is to highlight the scarcity. Another way to create urgency is put a time limit on it. We kind of have this busy lifestyle anymore that we want things immediately, but at the same time, we’re probably too busy while we’re on the phone to check something out and go, “You know what? I’ll actually do that later.” So on one level, we want something very fast, but at the same level, when it’s up to us to make that decision, we go, “You know what? I’ll do it later.” And then we kind of forget about it.

One way to combat that is to actually put a time limit on there, so say this offer, this deal is up at the end of the day. You have to book now. You have to come in, you have to claim this now. So it’s all about urgency. You want to make sure that the time limit is there. It’s not like an offer that will go forever, because that’s kind of indicated when we don’t actually highlight when we want people to act.

And finally, it’s a good call to action. To create a sense of urgency, you want to have a good call to action. I’ve seen a lot of salon marketing messaging which is pretty good but where they fall down is actually asking what they want the client to do with this information.

We have let’s say a email that you put together and you’re highlighting your new services, treatments that you have for the season. I’ve seen before where somebody doesn’t actually highlight what you want them to do with this information. Where what you want to do is have a nice, clear call to action which is, “Book in now.” You can put in a button if you can as well. What you want to do is make sure that we tell them the information that we need them to know and then we’re going to tell them what to do with this information by driving them to a website, driving them to the online bookings link or try to drive them somewhere where they can actually act upon what we’re talking about.

Those would probably be the top areas where I would highlight you can craft a message to create a sense of urgency. I hope you enjoyed that. Thank you so much, Neil, for the question. And guys, if you have any questions that you’d like answered on the Salon Marketing Q&A, please let me know in the comments box below or you can email us at letsgrow@phorest.com. My name’s Chris Brennan, thank you so much, and until next time, Let’s Grow!

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